Affliction (1989)
Some magazine was asking writers what they would
have become if they hadn't become a
writer, and I said what would have happened to me
is that I would have been stabbed to death in
the parking lot outside a bar in Florida at 24,
or something like that.
-Russell Banks to an Interviewer
Affliction is apparently a somewhat autobiographical novel about Wade Whitehouse, a crude & somewhat brutal son of a truly barbarous father. Wade is now in his forties, lives in the Mountains of Central New Hampshire and works as a well driller, snow plower and town constable. His high school sweetheart wife has left him and taken their daughter. Now Wade is reduced to living alone in a wind swept trailer and drinking way too much. Over the course of the novel, this is apparently a common theme for Banks, he realizes how desolate and desperate his life has become and he begins to lash out at his abusive father, shrewish ex-wife, his tyrannical boss and the towns uppity part time residents, the idle rich in their ski chalets. In particular, he becomes obsessed with regaining custody of his daughter and with proving that a seeming hunting accident was actually murder.
These twin compulsions turn out to be a lever with which Wade can pry open his hemmed in life and assert power for once. But the exercise of power and the awakening of self carry dangers which Wade is ill equipped to confront and tragedy lurks around the corner.
I liked this book much better than I expected to; the movie ads seem to promise merely another domestic abuse fiesta, but that story line is really somewhat peripheral. Wade's struggle to gain some control over his life is nearly heroic and we root for him top succeed. But Banks piles on such melodramatics that we anticipate that he is doomed.
There's also another weakness, and a more significant one. The story is narrated by Wade's brother in such an omniscient manner that it becomes distracting. You continually find yourself saying, how does he know that fact or know how that person felt. Also, the tone of his narration is so portentous that we know early on that Wade is headed for disaster; too early.
In the end, I recommend the book, but less whole heartedly than Ernest
Hebert's similar cycle
of New Hampshire novels.
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (B-)
